Subject: [hrpc] Edward Snowden on Protocols and Human Rights at IETF93

From: Niels ten Oever <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 14 Aug 2015 11:24:16 +0200

Hi all,

Mark Nottingham got the Q&A with Snowden at IETF93 transcribed, please
find it here: https://gist.github.com/mnot/382aca0b23b6bf082116

I pasted the part sepcifically about human rights underneath. There
are some very interesting points in there on non-discrimination, an
issue that was also often mentioned by the late Caspar Bowden.

Best,

Niels

Human Rights

0:18:55

Niels ten Oever: First, I'd like to thank you for your courageous work
and over the past years in the IETF community, there has been an
increasing trends in privacy which has been accelerated by your
courageous work. How – for example the statement on pervasive
surveillance and the guidelines for privacy considerations, but do you
think there could also be further work to protect other human rights
on a practical level such as freedom of expression?

Edward Snowden: Yeah. This is – so this is very much a delicate topic.
It's a very important topic and it’s a big question, so I can't really
get at it in depth.

I spoke a little bit about identity and this really speaks to – when
we think about human rights on the internet, the ones that immediately
come to everybody's mind are privacy and security, right? You can add
confidentiality in there as a part of privacy, and the idea is the
Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the US Constitution,
International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, all of these
frameworks that say what human rights are, they all say we have to be
protected against arbitrary interference at any kind of scale,
anything on target, anything they can justify in our communications.

Unfortunately, the internet has many ways of providing a very cheap
and effective means of interfering with those rights.

So, yes, everybody knows about that, right, but we need to think about
– when we think about identity, when we think about these other
things, we need to think about other human rights principles which are
very difficult to enforce through national mechanisms, right? We can
pass the best human rights laws in the world in the United States, in
the European Union, in Canada, wherever, it's not gonna help people in
Russia, in China, in Brazil, anywhere else.

But if we create a fabric – if we create a network through protocols
that provide means of access that can be guaranteed the safest –
internet that you get in France is just as good as the internet that
you connect to from China. That's a net win for human rights.

When we think about access, we also need to think about things like
non-discrimination, but again, how do you enforce non-discrimination,
something like that, through a protocol level? It's – it seems like
it's very difficult, but then when you think about what are the
mechanisms to which discrimination occurs from the human rights
context? And that's through affiliation, through association, again
through identity.

By anonymising people, by allowing them to divorce themselves from
their physical identity whether a member of a minority group and
agreed to – religious group or something like that – they have a
political affiliation that could get them jailed or killed in that
country. If you allow them to divorce themselves through the
technology, you're providing human rights ahead of the law, that law
will eventually recognise and support.

And this is something that I think people do not realise yet. Thinkers
do, a lot of technologists do, but the broad public doesn't really
think about the progress of human rights in the historic context.

Nobody was thinking about the speech rights of somebody when they were
living in caves and running from tigers. That doesn't mean that human
rights don't exist. It means that they are product of civilisational
progress and we, in the technological community, are the vanguard of
that progress today. We can provide new and enduring human rights that
generations of people will enjoy and that will be a net gain for
humanity as a family. But even if we don't go that far, I think we
have not just the right but the duty to ensure that the human rights
that we ourselves inherited will be passed along to those who come
behind us. We can use technology as the mechanism to achieve that.

Niels ten Oever: Thank you.
- -- 
Niels ten Oever
Head of Digital

Article 19
www.article19.org

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